De Hartog, Jan Captain Jan: A Story of Ocean Tugboats.

An abridged translation of de Hartog’s 1940 bestseller, Hollands Glorie. The original Dutch edition had been published about the time that Nazi Germany occupied Holland and became an immediate symbol of Dutch resistance when the Nazis subsequently banned the novel. Despite the ban, over 350,000 copies of de Hartog’s work were published and distributed through underground networks in the Netherlands during the Second World War, and for that reason it is included in this bibliography. De Hartog’s novel is actually set in the period 1900-1925 and follows the fortunes of a Dutch mariner who works his way up from deckhand to tugboat captain in the Dutch sea-going tugboat industry. It’s easy to see why the Nazis banned de Hartog’s book since his hero / protagonist spends nearly all of the novel fighting the forces of an avaricious, dirty-playing family dynasty (the Kwel family, who think nothing of cutting men’s wages to starvation level or of sinking its own vessels for insurance money) which had turned the once-independent fraternity of Dutch sea-going tug mariners into a monopoly controlled by the family, and in the process had pretty much enslaved the mariners themselves. By tale’s end de Hartog’s hero has not only forced the Kwel family patriarch out of public life but also forced the family to reform its business practices by recognizing the Dutch merchant mariners’ union.